March 1, 2023

Wins and Lessons

In almost a week, all four GCIL groups will present their projects in front of an auditorium filled with members of our organizations, BMS students, professors, and peers. Some will be presenting on projects they have been building on since our first round of iterations, while others have started from scratch in the past three weeks after receiving feedback and will be presenting an entirely new idea. I think both situations are equally daunting.

Just a few days ago, I received a message from one of our hostel security guards, Devindra. Most of his messages sound like, “Come to dinner,” “If you want tea come to ground floor,” “Is the WiFi working on the third floor?” or random facts such as how February 28th was National Science Day and that the largest lymphatic organ is the spleen. However, this message was instead a quote that read, “If we try, we win; if we lose, we learn from it.”

In my eyes, this quote sums up much of my experience here in Bangalore. Even this last week has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs, from, “How are we going to pull this off?” to, “It’s okay; we will have a nice break in Pondicherry,” to, “Oh no, someone has COVID again,” to, “Okay, maybe this solution could work,” to, “Oh no, did we switch our customer and beneficiary again?” to, “Thank you [redacted name] for maybe the most helpful interview we have had so far.” In this past week, and especially in these past nine weeks, I have tried a lot of new things – some have worked and some haven’t, but I have certainly learned from all of them.

I don’t know how to properly synthesize my experiences and learnings here, or if my synthesis can even do them justice. However, I’m not sure that it has to make complete sense to me. I hope that even after this program ends, I will continue to build on my learnings and see how I am able to apply them to new settings.

As we approach our presentations, I will keep Devindra’s quote in the back of my mind. It feels good to finally start to see all of our hard work come together. After over seven hours of interviews and what has felt like endless days of sitting on the hostel porch making sense of those interviews, identifying problems, and brainstorming, we have finally come up with a solution that might be viable. Emphasis on “might”. That in itself is a win to me. Everything else will be a lesson.

By Sophia